Technology

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Citrix

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XenServer

Wikipedia describes Virtualisation as follows: "...a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources."

In the ever-changing world of computing, virtualisation has come to mean many things, however, in the server virtualisation sphere, Citrix is establishing a new standard. Citrix XenServer provides high performance server virtualisation solutions that enable multiple virtual server instances to run concurrently on the same physical server, allowing far fewer servers to perform the same tasks.

XenSource evolved as a result of an Open Source project (Xen), pioneered by the University of Cambridge (still ongoing). Having been re-engineered to run on many different operating systems, including Windows, XenSource is a commercially available server virtualisation software that differs from its competitors in many ways.

Where others use emulation (executing instructions which are then simulated by the hypervisor), Citrix' main differentiator is its use of "paravirtualisation" - it sits directly on the bare metal and communicates seamlessly with the operating system. This results in much faster performance and stability.

The Xen hypervisor is now the industry-standard open source infrastructure virtualisation software, developed collaboratively by 20 of the world's most innovative data centre solution vendors and with global source code-level partnerships with Microsoft, Intel, AMD, IBM, and HP.

Citrix XenServer is ideal for IT professionals seeking to quickly install, build and manage a virtualization infrastructure for Windows and Linux in x86 server environments. XenEnterprise delivers dramatic improvements in server utilisation, reducing capital expenditures and infrastructure management costs through server consolidation, space and energy-saving.

Citrix XenServer, a member of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, is the simplest and most effective way to virtualise servers and deliver dynamic data centres that are responsive to the ever-changing demands of business. Using Citrix XenServer, companies can deploy high-performance virtual machines rapidly and easily, and manage them and their related storage and networking resources from a single easy-to-use management console.

The powerful provisioning capabilities now available in Citrix XenServer makes it the only platform than can integrate the deployment and management of virtual and physical servers into a unified dynamic virtualized infrastructure - a flexible aggregated pool of computing and storage resources.

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